I am very fortunate that my wife, Sharon, is not only tremendously supportive of my writing in general, but is totally invested in the characters and stories of my current Mike Stoneman Thriller series. We try to take a daily walk and we often kick around plot ideas, dialogue possibilities, character developments, and anything else that comes to our mind. She will wake up in the morning and tell me that she had a thought about some plot element, or some future story arc issue. She even takes “ownership” of a few of the minor characters and shepherds their progress through the stories. She proofs and edits all my books in the early stages and gives me critical feedback all the time. We joke a lot about an anecdote we heard told by humourist Dave Barry at a book signing he had with his co-writer, Ridley Pearson, when they were writing the Peter and the Starcatchers books. These were set in the world of Peter Pan, and there were mermaids in the story. Dave tells about how he and Ridley were arguing over a particular piece of dialogue, when one of them said to the other one, “A mermaid would never say that!” Sharon and I use that line a lot to each other.

It helps to have a supportive family. I spent ten years working on a serious literary fiction novel at a time when my kids were still in the house and we were all very busy with activities. Since the kids are gone (off to college, etc.), I have a lot more free time after work, and I use that time in the evening (usually while watching TV or a baseball game) to work on the writing (and marketing). Work gets in the way all the time, but I don’t have that many other distractions, so I can devote a few hours a day to it. When I was recording the audiobook versions of Righteous Assassin and Deadly Enterprise, I would record for an hour every night after dinner, then then spend the rest of the evening editing that day’s recording. I did that every day for two months to get both audiobooks in the can.

Early on in my writing career, I had problems writing female characters, and in particular realistic dialogue for female characters. My wife, and my editor (also my daughter) would tell me how bad I was at it, and they helped me. I still struggle with it. Perhaps all male authors do. It’s a work in progress.

I have a good friend, with whom I play poker regularly, who read book #1 in the series. One night, he arrived early for the poker game and told me that his wife had also read the book and she was very concerned about whether Michelle (the county medical examiner, and Mike Stoneman’s romantic interest) was OK at the end. There was some ambiguity about that (I realized). I was touched that she cared enough about the character to be worried. So, when I finished the draft of book #2, I sent it over to Buzz and Beth, to get some feedback from them while I was still in the editing stage. Buzz came by for another poker game a few months later and he had twenty pages of typed notes that he and his wife had worked on together. They mostly concerned Michelle and her relationship with Mike and the scenes where those two characters were interacting. Buzz told me that he had been married for 35 years, and that never in their marriage had he and Beth spent so much time talking about the same subject together. It’s not like they needed marriage counselling or anything, but their investment in the characters and their passion for what was happening in the relationship between Mike Stoneman and Michelle McNeill brought them closer together than ever before. I’ll never get a better review than that!

When Mike Stoneman needs to have a heart-to-heart with his partner, Jason Dickson, he drags Jason to his Upper West Side apartment, where he breaks out his best bottle of scotch. Jason protests that he’s not much of a scotch drinker, but Mike tells him that he’s got to learn. “I’m not having this conversation sober, and neither are you.”

I have a great designer at bespokebookcovers.com who handles the novels. I tend to have an idea in mind for the basic background, and sometimes I have the actual photo. Then, I let my designer do the work. For the short story, Fool Me Twice, I handled the cover design myself (hey, it's a free item, I'm not spending $600 to design a cover). Since the key location in the book is a swimming pool, the photo for the front cover was pretty easy to figure.

As a kid I read a lot of science fiction, and loved Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Isaac Asimov. And, of course, Tolkien. As an adult, I read a lot of mystery/detective stories and love Sara Paretsky, Linda Barnes, and Michael Connelly. There’s a little bit of Harry Bosch in my Mike Stoneman character. The main thing for me is a good plot and a story that I can really follow and get involved with. I think Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” may be my favorite book, partly because of the depiction of the legal system of the future.

There are no bad reviews (yet) for Deadly Enterprise, but I got a few for Righteous Assassin. There’s always somebody you can’t please. One guy wrote:

“Otherwise page-turning story ruined as the author goes out of his way to make sure his readers know the serial killer is a supposedly a born-again Christian. Really? Why? Does your hatred for Christ simply get in the way and you have to express it in this way?”

Really? what you got out of the story wasn’t that the killer was deranged and was using his psychotic delusion that he was God’s avenging Angel as a messed-up mental justification to kill people he thought deserved to die. No, you focused on the fact that the delusional killer’s God-complex was Christian-based, rather than Muslim-based. Talk about missing the point.

A Kindle Paperwhite eReader. Never fails me.

I ran a free offer for the first book in the Mike Stoneman Thriller series and got 4400 downloads, putting me #3 on the amazon "bestseller" list (for free books) in the crime-fiction category. But, to date I've had only a few reviews posted by those 4400 people. Hopefully they are all following me and will buy all the future books in the series.

My desk is spotless. I can't write if there's clutter.

I grew up in a small town in Washington state. In book #2 of the Mike Stoneman Thriller series, Deadly Enterprise, I had my main characters take a trip to my home town (because the girl who was murdered in New York was from Port Angeles, WA).

I've been writing poetry since high school. I first wrote a fiction story in college when I complained to my professor that I thought the ending of the book we read in a lit class was terrible. He asked me if I thought I could do better. I said, "Hell, yes!" He told me to go write a new final chapter. I did. I got an A+ in the class.

Book #3 in the Mike Stoneman Thriller series is underway. NYPD Homicide detective Mike Stoneman tries to take a vacation, but his cruise ship develops a rash of dead bodies. Fresh off the exciting conclusion of Deadly Enterprise (Mike Stoneman Thriller #2), Mike and his partner, Jason Dickson, need to get out of town to avoid prying questions about their recent outside-the-lines behavior. Mike’s love interest, county medical examiner Michelle McNeill, arranges for a quick cruise for them and Jason’s very recent girlfriend. But, instead of a relaxing vacation, they get dragged into an investigation when the wealthy wife of a Broadway talent agent dies in a fall from her balcony. The cruise line wants to pass it off as an accident or a suicide, but Michelle and Mike think otherwise. When a second dead body turns up, and then a third, the on-board production of Chicago is not the only place people are getting killed. Mike and Jason need to unwind the tangle of connections between the theater agent, the women he placed on the ship’s stage, and a murdered cabin attendant in order to find the killer before the ship gets back to New York. They also need to stay alive and make sure nobody else falls victim to this Lethal Voyage.

I really would prefer to have a traditional publisher. That's the next goal!

Providing a platform for me to quickly upload my work, particularly Fool Me Twice, which I wanted to make free so that readers can get it easily.

I recently completed the audiobook versions of the first two novels in the Mike Stoneman Thriller series. It's wonderful to think that my grandchildren will be able to listen to me narrate my books to them.